The only thing that stops the dust is the rain. It’s a sweet reprieve, but there is no middle ground. The land is either as dry as the Betty Ford clinic, or as wet as the ocean floor. Everything can be seen from the ridge overlooking Armadillo as John Marston gently bounces along atop...

EVE Online: Path to Kali Screenshots

EVE ONLINE® REVEALS THE PATH TO KALIContent System Will Empower Customers with Game Universe Destiny Control

ELECTRONIC ENTERTAINMENT EXPO, LOS ANGELES, CA -- MAY 10, 2006 -- The upcoming expansion to EVE Online—codenamed Kali—will introduce an innovative Advanced Reactive Content System (ARCS), in which the political landscape and physical borders of nation-states within the game can be altered dynamically through the collective outcome of player actions, thus directly controlling the game universe destiny and resulting storyline.Â

CCP will also release a newer version of the current award-winning graphics engine for EVE Online, which will take advantage of the latest DirectX 9 features to produce superior imagery and detail than the existing client.Â This Herculean effort requires that the game’s three hundred plus starships—each of which is composed of millions of triangles—be remodeled in ultra-high resolution. Players will then see these ships rendered by the power of per-pixel lighting, HDR, and soft-self shadowing.

"Games either provide active content, in which the player reacts to artificial changes in the game universe, or they provide reactive content, in which the entire game universe reacts to the actions that players decide for themselves," said Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games.Â "CCP believes strongly that the players should be the center focus of the storyline and control the evolution of the game universe.Â The Path to Kali will lead EVE Online to great heights in reactive content and further establish EVE Online as the premium free-form MMOG on the market today."

Parallel development of an entirely new graphics engine called "EVE Vista" is also underway.Â The new graphics engine—named “Trinity II”—will take full advantage of the new features and optimizations offered by DirectX 10, which will ship with the new Windows Vista OS. The highly anticipated graphics API will give Trinity II the ability to render far greater detail by leveraging the fully programmable shader pipeline and utilizing the API’s built-in instancing support. The combined technologies will allow CCP to continue building dynamic environments with visual effects that will surpass the already stunning graphical presentation of the game.

The final component of Kali will be factional warfare, in which players will have the option to align themselves with an NPC faction. Also included in the Path to Kali will be the opening of new regions in the game universe, the addition of significant exploration content, next-generation player R&D that includes reverse engineering capabilities, additional ship upgrades and player professions, the introduction of combat boosters, and the addition of new warships.

The Path to Kali will begin in Q2 2006 with the first release, and end in 2007 with the factional warfare implementation.

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About CCP

CCP Games is a privately held company that specializes in the creation, development, and distribution of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). Founded in 1997, CCP is recognized internationally as a pioneer in the single-server persistent universe concept of the MMOG genre. CCP Games is headquartered in Reykjaví­k, Iceland.

About EVE Online

Set tens of thousands of years in the future, EVE is a breathtaking journey to the stars, to an immersive experience filled with adventure, riches, danger, and glory. Supported by a vast player-run economy, EVE offers professions to choose ranging from commodities trader to mercenary; industrial entrepreneur to pirate; mining engineer to battle fleet commander; or any combination of these and much more. Your greatest asset is the starship, designed to accommodate your specific needs, skills, and ambitions. Complementing its lethal arsenal are thousands of modules and components, allowing for countless customizations. From brokering business deals to waging war, you will have access to a diverse array of sophisticated tools and interfaces to forge your own destiny in EVE.

Content on this page comes directly from press releases and fact sheets provided by publishers and developers and was not written by the Game Revolution staff.